XI.
“Discovery, the appropriation and creation of outlets, is too complicated a work,” says M. le Hardy de Beaulieu, “for the inventor singly, and especially without the aid of capital, to undertake with sufficient chance of success.”
Here again we believe the learned economist is in error; he seems to imagine one inventor arriving at perfection either at a jump, or after many attempts—one inventor giving us at once our ocean steamer, or a spinning-mill with a hundred thousand spindles! Inventions go more slowly; when they spring from the brain of the thinker, they are only sketches, and no man in his senses will risk a large capital before making many trials, and that only on a small scale. We do not believe there has been a single invention which, after numerous trials, has not been modified, improved, and perfected.
And how many have at last been thrown into oblivion, from which they will never be recalled?
Also, when we see the defenders of property in invention draw a sad picture of the piercing miseries which inventors of these last have had to endure, we are always tempted to ask them to show us the pitiful account of ruin caused among those who placed faith in their promises and delusions. Every medal has its reverse, and if more than one real inventor has been misunderstood, many of the too-confident have been victims of the mad and inapplicable ideas of inventors who imagined themselves men of genius.
Is the law, which seems to promise an Eldorado to all inventors, to blame for these losses, for these undeserved sufferings?
Bernard de Palissy’s saying, “Poverty hinders the success of the clever man,” is often quoted. But this saying will always be true, whatever the law may be. Can we admit that if perpetual property of invention had existed in his time, Bernard would more easily have found the money which he required?
The success of an invention is secured by the services it can render being easily understood, immediate, and speedily realisable. The capitalist, in dealing with hazardous undertakings—and inventors’ undertakings “are always hazardous”—does not calculate on perpetuity. He works for immediate and large profits; he is in a hurry to realise, because he knows that some other invention may dispossess him of all his advantages. Little does he care, therefore, about the perpetuity.